It was two hours before the splint was made and properly put on, and at the end of it I was quite done up. I found that the fact of my arrival had been reported to the Amîr, for His Highness most kindly ordered the palanquin of one of the Princes to be brought to the khirgar to convey me back to my house. I visited Samander once or twice after that to see that everything was all right, but my temperature began creeping up in a way that was not at all satisfactory, so that I had to give up going and simply trust to reports from the Hindustanis. [Sidenote: An Earthquake.] We had an earthquake a few days after this, at half-past five in the afternoon. The bed shook and the door and windows rattled, but it was quite a slight affair compared with the Kabul earthquakes. I called out to the Armenian, who was in the next room playing cards, to ask if he felt the shock. He came in to know if I wanted anything. “Didn’t you feel the earthquake?” I said. “The what, sir?” “The earthquake! Why, man, the house shook.” “Ah!” said he, “I did think a little the earth shivered, but I not notice.” On Christmas day my fever departed. Some time before, I had written to Mr. Pyne to ask him to send me a cook, if he could find one, and on Christmas day a cook arrived bringing a box of newspapers, Graphics and Punches, and a case of briar pipes, which had reached Kabul from London. The Graphics and Punches were a constant source of amusement to myself and my visitors, the older as well as the younger ones. I was astonished to find how little idea some of them had as to what a picture was intended to represent. For instance, in one of the Christmas numbers--it was of the year before, but that didn’t matter--a pig was represented standing up on his hind legs to take a view of the world outside his stye. Little Mahomed Omer, son of Perwana Khan, could not make the picture out at all; finally he came to the conclusion that it represented a horse in his stable. The Armenian allowed him to remain with that idea. The pig is unclean to the Mahomedans, and he would have been very disgusted if he had thought that we ate such a nasty creature. A frequent visitor at this time was a young man named Shere Ali, who was, I was told, the second son of the ex-Mir of Bokhara. A friendship commenced at that time between us which, like that of the Mirza Abdur Rashid, lasted till I left the country. Shere Ali was greatly interested in “Misterre Punch.” I had to go over the jokes and explain them to the Armenian--sometimes, in the more subtle ones, a matter of no little difficulty--and he translated them to Shere Ali in Persian. Shere Ali generally laughed, though I fancy from the little I had picked up of Persian, that the Armenian made his own point when he had missed mine. He was quite capable of both seeing and making a joke, as I found in after years when I brought him to London.